With the development and popularization of the Internet, Instant Messaging has gradually become one of the most primary applications, and an Instant Messaging tool has become an important communication tool due to its tremendous advantage in real-time communication and simply performance.
The development of image displaying technologies causes a new chance for the Internet. Various fresh and lovely Avatars have appeared.
A word “Avatar” is originated from Indian Sanskrit and its original meaning is “bilocation or incarnation”. The avatar has appeared widely in many hotspot network applications as standing for a virtual image since it was cited by a chat website in Korea named SayClub. The avatar satisfies user's demand for pursuing fashion. Specifically, the arbitrarily changeable sculpts and fancy fineries, as well as the novel props can exhibit a user's selfhood sufficiently in the network. Therefore, compared with a dull and expatiatory user ID, the avatar is a better image spokesman in the virtual world.
Combination with network communication makes the avatar really enter to various aspects of the network world, especially to a virtual image service, which is applied in an Instant Messaging tool and is a recreational communication value-added service. With the virtual image service a user can design a network virtual images, and costumes and scenarios thereof. Specifically, with the help of various virtual items such as fashionable fineries, trendy and fancy ornaments, beautiful and super-glaring background, and lovely and florid gifts, the user is able to perform operation on the avatar such as dressing up, plastic and other alternation. So the objects of exhibiting an avatar in the virtual word, prominent individualized dressing and obtaining realistic experience are attained.
Most of avatars in network communication, the representation of which includes the QQ show in the Instant Messaging tool QQ, are displayed in 2-Dimensionality, in which the format of corresponding images is GIF. A whole avatar is divided into two portions, fundamental personal model and accouterments. The fundamental personal model is divided into following components: head, trunk, arm, hand, leg, and foot. The avatar is made up from multiple images layer by layer. The sizes of the images are the same; the parts to be displayed of an image are adjusted to special areas while the other parts of the image are set transparent. An avatar server synthesizes the fundamental personal images and an accouterment image selected by the user, and sends the synthesized whole avatar to a network communication terminal. The synthesized image looks fancy and the size of the image fits to be transmitted under the existing network bandwidth condition. However, the spatial sense of the image is not strong and the animation representation is also limited. Therefore, the demand of interaction and representation for a high-end user cannot be satisfied.
Furthermore, the avatar of a user is static in the virtual chat mode, i.e. the avatar can not represent an action or voice corresponding to a symbol inputted in the chat block by the user. So the spatial sense of a 2-D avatar is not strong, the animation representation is also limited. Therefore, the demand of interaction and representation for a high-end user cannot be satisfied.
With the development of 3-D technologies, 3-D image which with finer quality and stronger spatial sense has been applied frequently. However, the finer quality a 3-D image has, the larger the 3-D image file is. In such a case, if the 3-D image is processed with the method of the 2-D image, the network delay would be intolerable to a user. So displaying a 3-D image in a terminal becomes difficulty. Therefore, the technology of providing a 3-D avatar for a network communication terminal under the existing bandwidth condition becomes the hot spot of the market.